P.I.R.I. News Archive

Despotistan

Depotistani President Abudullah Mutawwa address to the UN: “We have no Homosexuals in Despotistan”

Depotistani President Abudullah Mutawwa in an address to the General Assembly of the United Nations vehemently denied that homosexuality existed in his country.

The announcement was met with a hushed silence from members of the Assembly, punctuated only by Mutawwa’s immediate follow-up: “They are all dead”. “We kill them all!” he somberly proclaimed with a deadpan face. Mutawwa instantly broke into a chuckle and apologised to the Assembly for making what he called his little “infidel joke”!

After an uncomfortable moment, Mutawwa added “Of course I did not mean it”, as if to reassure his audience. The President went on to say that, quite simply, such a thing as homosexuality did not exist in his devout Republic, stressing that it was totally alien to both Islamic and Despotistani culture. “We don’t have this problem in our society” he affirmed, adding, “This sort of thing happens in weak, decadent places like Texas and London … people like George Bush do that with other degenerate leaders from the West, especially Irishmen and Australians.”

“Despotistan is very liberal, peace-loving and tolerant society” he said. “In Despotistan, it is acceptable to have sex with a cat!”, he told the startled General Assembly, “as long as it is a Persian cat … but you cannot perform the “Beast with Two Backs” with members of your own genital group. It is forbidden. Allah would kill the offenders, and those members would have their members cut off! The God of all Gods would have them hanged, brought back to life and then torn apart limb from limb by rabid, frenzied wild camels!”

The Despotistani President rounded off his UN speech by chanting the mantra “God is great, God is merciful” two hundred and fifty times in Ancient Akkadian.

As aspiring students get ready to make the transition to university, it’s timely to take a look back at the story of a typical first-year undergraduate from the class of 2014 in a characteristic regional Australian tertiary education hub.

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The Centralian

All that’s new from the centre of the continent

HIGHER EDUCATIONPRINT-FRIENDLYVERSION back

The pressure of being a fresher
By Kerry-Anne Wilderbeest May 31, 2014

Manitoba can barely speak without erupting into a flood of tears! Her Reichian Gestalt Therapist has prescribed her sedatives to cope with depression and anxiety, and after this week it will only get worse.

The 23-year-old is one of thousands of first-year uni students who are careening headlong into what counsellors say is the toughest test of their academic careers – getting through their first end of semester exams.

Semester assessments may not seem at all daunting to those annoying little swotting tragics within the student body but to the less conscientious “party-animal” types, it produces visions of train wrecks and beads of sweat around the temples. According to the naturally warm and empathetic University of the Warrumbungles head counsellor, Dr Ethel Molestrangler, it is a flashpoint for many freshmen – when all the external pressures of starting a new chapter in life collides with the reality of coping academically at a tertiary level. Drop-out rates go through the stratosphere at this time of year, low-percentage subjects get ruthlessly dropped and uni counselling units become popular places for new undergrads to congregate.

DET figures show that about 75% of first-years are not sighted again after the end of ‘O’ Week, except episodically in the union bar. Of the 1800 freshmen who enrolled at UOTW in February last year, 1700 had stopped attending classes by Easter (200 of these however were members of the University’s Red Sea Pedestrian Walkers Club protesting against the sale of Vietnamese pork rolls in the University Food Hall during Passover).

“Things are really crook for me … I haven’t slept properly in about three weeks”, Manitoba moaned in a veiled reference to the poor quality of her Sealy Posturepedic, adding unhelpfully that that she needed to remind herself to phone the Bungles’ 40 Winks store to check on the mattress warranty.

At the beginning of the year, having jogged across Jogjakarta, Manitoba island-hopped all the way to the Warrumbungles to join her partner, Winsome Perving, and begin a degree in plant pathology. On top of trying to settle into a new home and earning well below the Henderson Poverty Line from her part-time night job as an exotic crops cultivator, Manitoba has to deal with the unfamiliarity of the Australian tertiary ed system. Having to bribe lecturers with dead fish to secure extensions on assignments has come as a real shock to a girl of her sensitivities.

Manitoba is desperate, this coming week she will sit three exams, two lab tests and submit four assignments as part of the first raft of assessments for her course. “If the University admino-fascists don’t allow my request to withdraw without penalty from half of my semester one program, I may have to chain myself to the Vice-Chancellor’s Rolls Royce … I want the entire administration to know that I’m fully prepared to engage in a futile and meaningless gesture if that’s what is required!”, she plaintively added.BREAKING NEWS!

A look back at one of the big rating stories pulsating the length and breadth of the Primorsky Krai in 2005.

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Vladivostok Examiner

The World through the prism of the Far East

(English-language version)

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“Yes, I do read!” Cinnamon Girl protests

09:00 RFET Thu Sep 1 2005

NUUT – Metawati Semicomatoes, perhaps better known under her stage moniker, Enigmatic Cinnamon, is exasperated. She doesn’t understand why people say she is dead ignorant. She does read books in point of fact, the estranged wife of el bizarro boss of Mammoth Books Edwin Droog told the Examiner yesterday. “It’s only that as a young mother of three, I usually can’t finish them”.

“I often start a book but then I always get distracted by Romper Room or Late Night Poker, or its time to groom the boys, so I never seem to get the time to finish a book. I’m sure all mothers with three growing boys know where I’m coming from”, she confided in a revealing, exclusive interview.

“Of course we do read books together at home as a family. My two older boys, Hedwig and Caligula, both love reading stories about capital regrowth accounting, and I often read them fables at bedtime about the dangers of overreliance on long-term investment strategies”.

The Droogs’ third son, Kruiselnitski, who at six months of age is considered by his mother to be too young to get into books. “I might get him straight on to the iPod instead. Someone in the family needs to learn how to use this damn technothingamee gadget, coz I ain’t got a clue!” the eloquent Metawati gushed.

Semicomatoes was a member of the mega-popular late 80s and early 90s heavy metal C&W girl rap band, the Cinnamon Girls. The question of her reading tastes came up recently when the Examiner’s sister newspaper, the Nuut Daily Soporific, quoted Metawati as saying, “I haven’t read a book in my life”, and going on to indicate a preference for listening to ambience music and reading 1950s American tractor repair manuals.

The busy single supermum went on to say that those people who think she spends all of her day provocatively walking round in high heels and fishnet stockings are dead wrong. “Trust me”, she added, “at home with nobody else around, we are just so incredibly normal!” In a rare moment of philosophical contemplation the aromatic former singer said, “All day long I always find myself just flat-chat, doing all the everyday stuff – supervising the maid’s duties, checking the answering machine and adjusting the temperature on the jazucci. Its just boredom, boredom, boredom, which fortunately for everyone is interrupted by the occasional outbreak of tedium!” she added cheerfully.